l of soul and
graceful in person. There is no duchess or marchioness in Madrid, no
empress in all the world, no queen or princess on the face of the globe,
to be compared to the ideals and fantastic creations with whom I have
lived. These were inhabitants of the castles and boudoirs, marvels of
luxury and taste, that I pleased myself in boyhood by erecting in my
fancy, and that I afterward gave as dwelling-places to my Lauras,
Beatrices, Juliets, Marguerites, and Leonoras; to my Cynthias, Glyceras,
and Lesbias. Them I crowned in my imagination with coronets and Oriental
diadems; I clothed them in mantles of purple and gold, and surrounded
them with regal pomp like Esther and Vashti; I endowed them, like
Rebekah and the Shulamite, with the bucolic simplicity of the
patriarchal age; I bestowed on them the sweet humility and the devotion
of Ruth; I listened to them discoursing like Aspasia, or Hypatia,
mistresses of eloquence; I enthroned them in luxurious drawing-rooms,
and cast over them the splendor of noble blood and illustrious lineage,
as if they had been the proudest and noblest of patrician maidens of
ancient Rome; I beheld them graceful, coquettish, gay, full of
aristocratic ease and manner, like the ladies of the time of Louis XIV,
in Versailles; and I adorned them, now with the modest _stola_, that
inspired veneration and respect; now with diaphanous tunics and
_peplums_, through whose airy folds were revealed all the plastic
perfections of their graceful forms; now with the transparent _coa_, of
the beautiful courtesans of Athens and Corinth, showing the white and
roseate hues of the finely molded forms that glowed beneath their
vaporous covering. But what are the joys of the senses, what the glory
and magnificence of the world, to a soul that burns with and consumes
itself in Divine love, as I believed mine, perhaps with too much
arrogance, to burn and consume itself? As volcanic fires, when they
burst into flame, send flying into air, shattered in a thousand
fragments, the solid rocks, the mountain-side itself, that obstruct
their passage, so, or with even greater force, did my spirit cast from
itself the whole weight of the universe and of created beauty that lay
upon it and imprisoned it, preventing it from soaring up to God, as the
center of its aspirations. No; I have rejected no delight, no sweetness,
no glory, through ignorance. I knew them all, and valued them all at
more than their worth, when I reject